New Mac Book Pro Hard Drive full

So I recently purchased two new mac computer, a mac book pro and an iMac. Love them both, but I am having a stupid issue with the mac book pro. My issue is that my harddrive is showing only 25G of space free and there is basicly nothing stored on the computer. No movies, itunes, pictures, basically nothing. I am not exactly sure what is going on but I think there must be some hidden files with copies of files that were transiently on the computer but have since been removed. At one point I was using dropbox to sync and transfer files, but I have since removed it, as well as all of the files. And before you ask, yes I have already deleted the dropbox cache as well as the backup copies in the volumes folder. Oh and yes my trash is empty as is my iphoto trash. Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

If these two computers were just purchased brand new...then contact Apple regarding any "full" hard drive issues. At this point with new computers...Apple should be the first place you should be contacting.

- Nick

- Too many "beachballs", read this: Beachballs- Computer seems slower than it used to? Read this for some slow computer tips: Speedup- Almost full hard drive? Some solutions. Out of Space- Apple Battery Info. Battery

Time Machine automatically keeps local backups on Mac notebooks - it does not on desktop Macs.
However, those local backups do not register as taking up any space in Finder while they do in Disk Utility. So, since you are using the Finder to determine the amount of free space, those backups would not be counted as used space.

For an accurate picture of your used space and free space, you must use Disk Utility - not About this Mac nor Finder.

For 3rd party apps, I recommend WhatSize. It allows you to size the drive as administrator which will show you all folders/files on the drive. DiskInventoryX does not have this capability and may not show you everything on the drive.

I cannot be held responsible for the things that come out of my mouth.
In the Windows world, most everything folks don't understand is called a virus.

If Finder and Disk Utility are showing the same, then those local Time Machine snapshots are not your issue.

If DiskInventoryX is matching the Disk Utility info, then you just need to browse further into the large folders.

While I advise WhatSize, purchasing it at this point is not going to gain you an advantage in your current situation, aside from being, imho, a better interface and perhaps a little more maneuverable in those folders.

Are you using any Steam games - those can take up huge amounts of space and their applications are neither seen as Applications by OS X nor are they stored in the Applications folder.

I cannot be held responsible for the things that come out of my mouth.
In the Windows world, most everything folks don't understand is called a virus.

Just be aware - About This Mac may give you an idea of what type of data is taking up space, it also does not recognize those local TM snapshots as taking up any space and they will fill a drive until it reaches 80% full.

I cannot be held responsible for the things that come out of my mouth.
In the Windows world, most everything folks don't understand is called a virus.

So I checked with: about this Mac and it showed that I had 180+ gigs of backups on my mbp. I had no idea that back it up to an external would also keep copies on the mbp hard drive. Why does it do that?

So I checked with: about this Mac and it showed that I had 180+ gigs of backups on my mbp. I had no idea that back it up to an external would also keep copies on the mbp hard drive. Why does it do that?

It should offload the backups if you connect to a designated external drive for Time Machine as you did not state what you were using.
If I am away for awhile mine will write to my internal drive as soon as I return home it latches on to my Time Capsule and offloads the backups then my free space is back to normal.